YOU ARE NOT HERE!

What if?

What if I told you that every human, every single one of us were adopted! Brace yourself ‘cause I am going to do just that. To put forward my idea, I ask you one commonsensical question, the answer to which you ought to know. What is the name of our parent Galaxy?

The Milky Way, you say…

You may be wrong, and here it is that I go forward and tell you that you, the earth, the moon, the planets and our own sun have been adopted by the milky way.

So, how did it all begin you may ask?

The 200 billion star Milky Way Whirlpool Disc has continually been capturing and absorbing ‘many’ smaller galactic systems termed “dwarf galaxies”. Apparently, the milky way has been practicing it’s cannibal ways again. This time with a lesser known galaxy called Sagittarius, 10,000 times smaller than the Milky Way. “It’s clear who’s the bully in the interaction,” says Steven Majewski, U.Va. professor of astronomy and lead author on the paper describing the results.

By using infrared maps, the astronomers filtered away millions of foreground stars to focus on a type of star called an M giant. These large, infrared-bright stars are populous in the Sagittarius galaxy but uncommon in the outer Milky Way. The 2MASS infrared map of M giant stars analyzed by Majewski and collaborators is the first to give a complete view of the Milky Way galaxy’s meal of Sagittarius stars, now wrapping like a spaghetti noodle around the Milky Way.

The fact that the Milky Way is seen in the sky at an angle has always puzzled astronomers. If we originated from the Milky Way, we ought to be oriented to the galaxy’s ecliptic, with the planets aligned around our Sun in much the same angle as our Sun aligns with the Milky Way. Instead, as first suggested by researcher Matthew Perkins Erwin, the odd angle suggests that our Sun is influenced by some other system. Together with data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey we now know what it is. We actually belong to the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy.

But how does it affect us?

Well, one of the implications lie in one of the major problems we are facing…

GLOBAL WARMING: It has been postulated that this is the real reason for both global warming since higher energy levels of the Milky Way are almost certain to cause our Sun to burn hotter and emit higher energies. Indeed, temperatures have been seen to rise on virtually all the planets in our system. This seems quite apart from any local phenomenon like greenhouse gases etc.

There are other repercussions…but maybe some other time.

Bye for now fellow adopted humans.

~ by Ankit Bhatia on April 28, 2008.